NBA games have been changing. In particular, such play style shift, through ’positionless’ basketball, has often been associated with more three- pointer attempts and fewer inefficient mid-range shots. However, while such aggregate trend is trivial to analyze, we pose three outstanding questions that the aggregated trend fails to encapsulate. First, is that there is a growing volume of three-point specialists coming into the league. Second, is that there is a change in play style across all players. Third, is that such trend is heterogeneous across top and bottom performing teams. Through player clusters created from a Finite Mixture Multinomial model, we found that the overall shift towards three-pointers seen in the NBA is attributable both to a growing volume of rookies who are focused on predominantly shooting threes and a more general trend where all-around players are transitioning to become three-point specialist, albeit decreasing over time. In addition, while both the top and bottom performing teams subscribe to similar trends of acquiring more three-point shooters, we do see weak evidence suggesting that top teams appear to be capturing this trend at a faster rate.…Read More
